Warnings of Hitler's ambitions go unheeded

We quite often hear it said that in the run-up to World War Two, no-one
quite realized the scale of the threat that Nazi Germany posed in Europe.
When Hitler set his eyes on Czechoslovakia, there were plenty of
politicians in Western Europe who really seemed to believe him, when he
said that the Czech borderlands, the so-called Sudetenland, were his
“last territorial claim”. But Czech Radio’s archives show clearly
that here in Prague there were also plenty of people who were only
too aware of the worldwide menace that Hitler posed. As Britain and France
pursued their policy of appeasement towards Germany, these were voices
that, tragically, remained unheard.

Here, for example, is the Prague left-wing journalist Kurt Konrad, who on
the September 17 1938, a few days before the Munich Agreement was signed,
hit the nail on the head in describing Hitler’s real ambitions for the
Czechoslovak Republic.

“According to his conviction, Hitler wants the whole of
Czechoslovakia,
not only the Sudetenland, and no concessions in the Sudeten German
question
could satisfy the ever-increasing appetite of the Third Reich, as long as
these concessions were to preserve the sovereignty and unity of the
republic. He means to weaken and crush the republic, and turn it into a
vassal state of Germany. According to his opinions, the airplanes
constructed in the highly efficient Czechoslovakian factories, should
appear in the service of the Third Reich above London bearing deadly
freight.”

Kurt Konrad was spot on. Within two years bombs were falling on London,
and Hitler really did use Czech armaments – and in particular tanks - in
his invasion of Western Europe, weapons that he had gained without a shot
being fired. Kurt Konrad paid a high price for the clear-sightedness. He
was arrested just months after Nazi troops fulfilled another of his
predictions and stormed into Prague in March 1939, and he was to perish in
a Gestapo prison in Dresden in 1941.

Another prominent Czech who had no illusions about Hitler, was the
professor and historian Jan Slavík, who spoke on Radio Prague on 29th
September 1938, pointing out the hypocrisy of Hitler’s claims to be
defending the civil rights of Czechoslovakia’s German minority.

Adolf Hitler signs the Munich Agreement“The opinions are being voiced today that Germany is fighting for
the
right of self-determination for the German people. They have to be
answered
as follows. He has no right to expound these high principles who is
treading on them by the theory of the supremacy of his race, by his
theories of master and slave nations. Our conscience is clear. Our
democratic state has been and is ready to give equal rights to all its
nationalities, but on the other side, those who want to make use of the
right to self-determination against us have no moral right to do so, until
they proclaim before the whole world the principle that they recognize the
equality of all nations as well as their right to live. Until they
disclaim
the programme of violent conquest of the territories of other European
nations as it is outlined in Adolf Hitler’s book ‘My Struggle’,
their
excited shouting about the rights of their nation remains a mere
sound.”

By a bitter irony, Professor Slavík’s warning was broadcast on the very
same day that Hitler and Mussolini, and the British and French Prime
Ministers, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier, met in Munich to
grant
Hitler nearly a third of Czechoslovakia’s territory. Sadly Mr
Chamberlain
was not one of those who listened to Radio Prague’s English broadcasts!